this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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'First time we have detected a crime using this method,' cops say Spanish police arrested a hacker who allegedly manipulated a hotel booking website, allowing him to pay one cent for luxury hotel stays. He also raided the mini-bars and didn't settle some of those tabs, police say.…

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[–] riskable@programming.dev 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Define, "hacked." I ask because there's degrees to this sort of thing.

Example 1: Hacker finds SQL injection vulnerability and uses it to change his bill after booking.

Example 2: "Hacker" changes the HTML form that submits his booking by changing a read-only value to read-write and adjusts the price to $1.

The first one is actual hacking. The second? Come on! In that case the hotel accepted the booking with the reduced price. That's not really hacking, that's just a comedy of errors in judgement on behalf of the hotel.

The second example is like changing the price tag on something in a store to $0.01 and then having the clerk look at it and say, "well, that seems low but the price that says one cent, so..." 🤷

[–] Fiery@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago

Your example 2 is just describing improper input validation/bad logic. Which... Is still hacking. It's just a different category of vulnerability and difficulty (though slamming a SQL inject in every input field you can't find isn't the most complex either).

Example 3: guy finds admin panel with default password - still hacking Example 4: guy finds improperly secured admin endpoints in booking software - also hacking Example 5: booking server wasn't updated in 2 years and hacker uses a PoC exploit he pulled from somewhere to hack it - yup also hacking Etc

All those are wildly different ways of achieving the end result but they all share two things: 1. They're hacking 2. They're illegal to use for anything other than responsible disclosure

[–] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago

Keep vibe coding, kids.

And if I'm ever on this guy's jury, the evidence doesn't sound compelling, to me. Sounds like a misunderstanding.